Photographs and essay by John Divola The desert is not empty

high desert journal
dogs
chasing
my car
in the
desert
Photographs and essay by John Divola
The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a
certain weight to whatever is present. This is an extraordinary place, the
unobstructed view to the horizon, the quality of the light, and that smell
after it rains. Add this to a heightened awareness of your own presence
and the desert can take on an existential quality.
Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert
was published as a companion
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And it’s quiet. Once, having climbed to the top of a very large hill to
photograph, I was startled by the sound of the wind moving under the
book to the artist’s book
wings of a bird as it flew by. Hundreds of feet below and half a mile away a
Isolated Houses and is limited to
dog spotted me and started barking like it had just caught me climbing the
1,000 casebound copies.
back fence. No one sneaks up on a dog in the desert. A dog can hear your
Available from Nazraeli Press:
car coming for several miles and will see you coming almost as far away.
www.nazraeli.com
By the time you arrive he has developed a level of anticipation.
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From 1995 to 1998, I was working on a series of photographs of isolated
houses in the desert at the east-end of the Morongo Valley in Southern
essay continues on page 28
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high desert journal
high desert journal
> California. As I meandered through the desert, a dog would
occasionally chase my car. Sometime in 1996, I began to bring
along a 35mm camera equipped with a motor drive and loaded
with a fast and grainy black-and-white film. The process was
simple; when I saw a dog coming toward the car I would prefocus the camera and set the exposure. With one hand on the
steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and
expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film.
I’ll admit that I was not above turning around and taking a
second pass in front of a house with an enthusiastic dog.
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Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites
any number of metaphors and juxtapositions:
culture and nature, the domestic and the wild,
love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the
idiotic. It could be viewed as a visceral and
kinetic dance. Here we have two vectors and
velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and,
seeing that a camera will never capture reality
and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence
of devotion to a hopeless enterprise. < hdj >
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